Monday, December 20, 2010

One of the best things about social networks (or worst, if you're a Facebook-hater) is the ability to take funny little "things that make you go hmmm...." snippets of everyday life and share them with the world. The folks at Wingate University recently had a little fun by making a YouTube video poking fun at the fact that people can't settle on one correct pronunciation for their school's title, and for the town it's named after. Is it Win-GATE or Win-GIT?

When I first moved to the Charlotte area, I lived in Rock Hill, where I quickly got reprimanded by locals when I pronounced the name of nearby town of Sharon as if it were the popular woman's name. Nope, they told me, it's SHAY-run. When I pronounced the name of nearby Lancaster County as you would the actor Burt Lancaster, I got corrected again. It's LANK-a-stir, they told me.

There's a ton of similarly weird name spellings/pronunciations around the region. Which ones are your favorites?

Bechtler Museum, if only read, is going to be hard to get right. I would not have guessed "Beck-l'r" had I not heard it.

LANK-astir (Lancaster) makes sense to anyone from here but to anyone from outside this area, that's impossible to guess.

Northern transplants seem to have (a very understandable) difficulty with Concord (wanting to pron. like Kong-k'rd MA).

And I, who have lived in the Piedmont for eons still cannot always tell when someone is talking about the "M" town outside Cary vs. the one north of Charlotte . . . "Moors-vul" and "Moorez-vul" sound the same to me (i.e. talking about Mooresville and Morrisville respectively). I guess if you never lived in both the RTP and CharMeck areas, you'd never know there is room for confusion.

Anon 2:34 PM - There are several "explanations" for that, most were plucked from the sky, really. But one that makes a degree of sense is that the intersection of Trade and Tryon is actually higher than a good part of the city, so prior to the population explosion people actually had to go up to get there, so they went up into town, this was contracted over time to "uptown". As silly as it sounds, that's why.

In the 80's the Chamber of Commerce latched onto the "uptown" name, thinking it sounded more positive than downtown (and, though corny, it does) and promoted the heck out of it. But the usage of it predates this by awhile.

The town of Cashiers, up in the mountains. Looks like the plural of the word used to describe a person behind a cash register, but the locals pronounce it as if the I was not in the word. I.e. cashers, sounds like mashers.

There are so many mispronounciations, and they all drive me crazy. You can tell the tv news media are all from somewhere else by the way they constantly mispronounce everything. It makes me cringe. Even worse, one meteorologist said that it was "chilly" this morning. You're from up North, aren't ya? Yeah, I thought so. It's not "chilly." It's COLD!

It's not the mispronunciations by newcomers that drive me nuts nearly as much as the voice overs on local TV commercials where I hear 'CAHNkurd' or 'SAALLSbury'. If your company's announcer can't even pronounce the name of the city the 'local' way, why on earth should I shop there??

I, too, was corrected by the locals a lot when I moved to Charlotte many, many years ago. Coming from a town that ended in the word “ville,” it was hard to get used to having to pronounce it “vul” like Moores-vul or States-vul.

To this day I still haven’t figured out if the town of Stallings in pronounced St-ALL--ings or St-AL-lings. I always hear it both ways.

I'm a native and my family has been here for generations... maybe I can help with a few of these. Anon 5:31, it's BROOK-shur, and Anon 6:18, it's MACK-alway. Aviatorguy, Stallings is traditionally pronounced STALL-ings, as in "stallion" or the man's name "Al." Hope that helps! Welcome, transplants... hope you didn't come here to get warm!